Increase Profitability with Pittbos

BY SARAH REDOHL

Pittbos is a new technology platform that aims to help asphalt paving contractors build better estimates and proposals. The platform was designed to meet the estimation, sales tracking and order management needs of asphalt paving companies of any size.

The platform is the brainchild of asphalt industry veteran Mark Peach, former vice president of Benevento Companies, Wilmington, Massachusetts.

“A lot of tools are built by companies who aren’t familiar with our industry and may not understand how complex it is to build a road,” said Peach, who serves as CEO of Pittbos. With more than 20 years of experience in the asphalt industry, Peach hoped to develop a tool that would help asphalt contractors grow their businesses. Pittbos is the result of that vision. “Our first products are based on estimating because every job won or lost should start with an accurate and professional proposal. Our long term goals are to build more products that make using Pittbos a full cycle business platform that will strengthen customer bottom lines.”

“We’re not a technology company trying to enter a market blindly to simply capitalize on a business space,” Peach said. “Pittbos contains all the knowledge that comes with managing asphalt paving crews, milling crews and asphalt plants for over 20 years.”

That firsthand experience in the asphalt industry gave the team behind Pittbos a deeper understanding of the pain points faced by asphalt professionals, Peach said. “A lot of contractors running $5 to 30 million businesses are doing so without the technology to fully understand their costs, how much work they have, or their sales pipeline,” Peach said. Furthermore, he and his team felt existing estimating software options were too expensive and required too much of a learning curve for contractors.

“There are a lot of great products out there, but many of them are designed for larger companies in our market or are general tools that don’t factor in the unique needs of asphalt contractors,” Peach said. “That’s why we’re dedicated to serving the asphalt industry with a tool that works for contractors of any size.”

THE FINER POINTS OF PITTBOS

Pittbos is a cloud-based tool, which means its users don’t need software or servers to run the program. This also means users can manage proposals and documents from anywhere on any device and that these are always backed up. With the amount of data entering the platform, Pittbos takes the security and protection of its customer data very seriously.

“We know that the lifeblood of any organization is the data that they have on hand—that is why we include military-grade encryption on all data on our systems,” said Peach.

The company ensures data stays safe by using the industry standard AES-256 algorithm, the same technology utilized by financial service institutions to secure sensitive financial information. Additionally, all data that enters and leaves the platform happens over secure (SSL/TLS) connections and telemetry data and logs are sanitized to remove personally identifiable information (PII).

Peach said his team spent a great deal of time on user interface/ user experience so Pittbos would be easy to use, even for contractors who aren’t tech savvy. One of Pittbos’s first customers, Todd Coviello of Pavements Inc., Middleton, Massachusetts, was running his commercial and residential paving company without ever having owned a computer. “He’s been able to jump right in, running Pittbos on his iPad and his first laptop,” Peach said.

One feature Peach said makes Pittbos stand out is its flexibility. For example, it has a library of reusable estimating items to create proposals more quickly. “Users can build out resource libraries with the fullest details or keep them as basic as they want,” Peach said. “We want to meet the contractor where they are, instead of telling them how we think they should estimate.”

The platform also allows users to add notes and reminders, so everyone within the organization can be on the same page.

In addition to creating proposals, Pittbos can also be used as a sales tracking tool to organize proposals, track proposal status, oversee a company’s book of work, and recently added area takeoff functionality. The platform’s reporting dashboard can be used to view proposal wins and losses, performance insights and analytics. Pittbos can also be used for backlog management to monitor workload, reduce downtime and forecast more accurately.

“We want to help contractors easily see where they stand as a business and apply that information intelligently to their individual markets to drive more profit,” Peach said. “Our tools give contractors a way to understand if they’ve got too much work at the moment and perhaps it’s time to raise prices or if they don’t have enough work and need to get more aggressive in the market without having to wait 30 days for financial reporting.”

Another benefit of Pittbos, Peach said, is that all these features are available within one platform. “We’ve heard from our early adopters that they’ve been able to replace four or five different software solutions with Pittbos,” he added. “That eliminates data loss, reduces confusion, and makes it so the contractors don’t need to learn several programs to do what we can offer in one.”

And this is only the beginning, Peach said. “As a dynamic company grounded in asphalt industry experience, our vision is to bring in the supplier side as well in order to create seamless communication between the contractor and supplier.” Eventually, they want Pittbos users to be able to order mix, dispatch trucks, schedule orders and trucks and access live job site cost data.

“This is a high stakes industry that involves an expensive and perishable product,” Peach said. “Solid logistics and the right software is a must, today and in the future.”